Henrion & Parkin’s Systematic Design Methods

This seminar brought together six speakers invited to map current research drawing on F H K Henrion’s archive and to consider the opportunities it offers for research collaboration.

The invited speakers were: Sue Breakell (University of Brighton), Adrian Shaughnessy (Royal College of Art), Rob Banham (University of Reading), David Preston (University of the Arts London), David Cabianca (York University, Canada) and Patrick O’Shea (Kingston University).

The afternoon’s sessions related to existing research projects which, while they may not focus solely on Henrion, have his work as a component, contextualizing and enriching the field of study. The first of these was David Preston, a graphic designer and an Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins, as well as a PhD candidate at the RCA. Looking at several of Henrion’s early corporate design schemes, including Pest Control of Cambridge and the Dutch airline KLM, David described some of the systematic techniques developed by Henrion and his partner Alan Parkin to analyse and manage the various design outputs and formats in which corporate identity schemes would be presented. He set these in the context of other influential writing on systematic design methods such as that of Bruce Archer.